Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 5

In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the contemporary Christian church. This is installment five in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

Jung, though Protestant, felt the Roman Catholic dogma of Assumptio Mariae, the bodily-assumption-into-heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the modern Christian church. This dogma was declared in 1950, near the end of Jung's lifetime (and the beginning of mine).

Symbolically, Jung identified Mary's bodily entry into the holy presence of the Three-in-One as the answer to something medieval alchemists had looked for in their philosophy of the mysterium coniunctionis. This phrase referred to the mystical conjunction which alchemists believed could unite seemingly disparate base elements into noble and incorruptible material such as gold. This coniunctio or conjunction as it applied to physical substances patterned with a spiritual/psychological transformation that occurred in three stages:

• First, each individual soul would cleave to a universal spiritual principle (e.g., the Holy Spirit)
  
• Second, the resulting spiritual union would be joined back to the original body
  
• Third, the mind/soul/spirit/body unit would be reunited with the unus mundus ("one world") representing the "ground and origin" from which every body-soul emerges
  

The first conjunction is symbolized in Christianity by the coming of the Holy Spirit. The second, by the sacred marriage between Christ and the church — representing a corporeal body — in the Book of Revelation ... and also by the bodily Assumption of Mary. Moreover, the very identity of Christ as God and Man is symbolic of the union of the spiritual and the material.

The third and final conjunction is not one for which it is easy to find symbols within Christian faith. According to Stein (p. 175), "Jung compares the experience of this third conjunction with 'the ineffable mystery of the unio mystica, or tao, or the content of samadhi, or the experience of satori in Zen ... '."


Each of the three stages of alchemical conjunction, Jung said, accords with a key event in the development of the psyche as it evolves toward its final goal of wholeness.

The first alchemical stage "brings about a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction." Translation: the ego as the center of individual conscious awareness needs to be shored up by a spiritual transformation before it can withstand the rigors of the second and third stages.

The second alchemical stage "results in a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness." Translation: at great risk, key portions of the unconscious psyche (the "shadow" and also the "animus" or "anima" — see below) are successfully incorporated into conscious awareness.

The third alchemical stage at last unites, or replaces, ego-consciousness with "the basic psychic structure common to all souls." Translation: all of the unconscious psyche has been integrated into conscious awareness. Put another way, the conscious ego cedes pride of place as the center of the psyche to the self, the archetype representing psychic wholeness. (Personally, I am visualizing this stage as a sort of "Zen awakening" such as happened to the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton — see Enchantment, Zen, and Spiritual Dialogue.)


To Jung, the "ego" or "ego-consciousness" meant the "I" at the center of our conscious awareness. The "I" is characterized initially by its failure to include in overt awareness all of the promptings of the psyche. Some of our inborn bundles of psychic energy — our numerous packets of "libido" — are blocked from conscious representation.

"Stored" libido is present in the psyche in and through our "archetypes." Archetypes are energy sources that power ancient "images" we all carry with us in our "collective unconscious."

Each ancient archetypal image surrounds an archetype per se, in the way that every galaxy in the universe surrounds an invisible black hole. For example, the archetype of the self, representing wholeness, powers the mandala image commonly found in sacred Buddhist and Hindu art, an example of which appears at right.

Jung also referred to archetypal images as "imagoes" (singular "imago"), "inner objects," or simply the inborn "contents" of the collective unconscious.

Many of the archetypal images are personifications. For example, we each carry in our psyche a preexisting image of a Redeemer. In Christianity, Christ himself symbolizes this inbuilt Redeemer image.

Some archetypal images represent polar opposites, e.g., light and dark, male and female, hard and soft, divine and human, good and evil. Sometimes, one of each pair of polar-opposite archetypes is held in the unconscious realm, in a hidden complex associated with the ego's "shadow." The "shadow" itself is an archetype. Deprecated archetypes that are connected to the shadow as a result of being repressed are often represented in dreams and myths in coded, symbolic form.

Yet these repressed archetypes can and should be integrated into consciousness, Jung held, yielding a "stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness." Apparently, or so I'm guessing, this can happen safely during the second conjunction only after the "spiritual" first conjunction has been established.

My guess is that the first conjunction is what happens when a person's faith catches fire. For Evangelical Protestants, this is the "born again" experience. One must be "born again" (or its spiritual equivalent in other faith traditions) before it is safe to even contemplate undergoing the second conjunction, much less the third.


Also integrated into ego-consciousness during the second conjunction is the "anima" (for men) or the "animus" (for women). The anima or animus centers on the deprecated archetype for, respectively, femininity or masculinity. For a man, for example, the archetype for femininity is typically deprecated as inappropriate for expression in his outward personality or, in Jung's lexicon, his "persona." It remains in the unconscious as the anima. Likewise, a woman's deprecated masculine archetype constitutes the animus in her unconscious mind.

Apparently, when the ultimate goal of individuation or self-realization is reached, the anima/us is "depotentiated," or reduced in power. Having been integrated into conscious awareness, it loses its power to thrust its way unbidden into the realm of the ego, upsetting all apple carts. Likewise, once the anima/us has been depotentiated, the persona, the mask we wear to hide from others what's really going on in our psyche, loses its power to dominate the ego. The conscious ego and its unconscious shadow remain, but now they work together, having been joined into a harmonious whole by the restoration of the self.

Again, I am supposing that this integration/depotentiation of anima or animus can happen safely during the second conjunction only if the "spiritual" first conjunction has happened. This is why Murray Stein speaks of the result of the first conjunction as "a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction."


Following the second conjunction, an expanded and integrated ego-consciousness ideally exists, one that is inclusive of the shadow and the animus/anima by virtue of the unifying aspects of the self. Stein calls this result "a difficult and remarkable achievement on the part of an individual, requiring much taxing and often repetitious effort to stabilize" (p. 175). On a personal note, I feel that I am presently going through that sort of "taxing and repetitious effort" myself ... and I am making these blog posts as a part of that effort!

This I think is why I respond strongly to the notion of "reinventing the sacred" expressed by Stuart A. Kauffman in his new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. It was with this book that I began this Reinventing the Sacred series of posts. The idea of reinventing the sacred symbolizes, for me, the "repetitious effort" I am making!